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Where would it live? I assume like many mammals, it needs to be raised and taught by its parents. Are they gonna drive up to the Canadian border and just dump i
by nerpderp82 3y ago
Where would it live? I assume like many mammals, it needs to be raised and taught by its parents. Are they gonna drive up to the Canadian border and just dump it off?
- justrealist 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park seems like a good option
- schainks 3y agoThere was a good Oxford style debate on NPR about whether resurrecting the mammoth is a good idea. The most interesting point I heard _against_ doing something like this was along these lines: If we were to use an elephant mother host to grow the fetus, once the mammoth is born, it is possible the herd will immediately recognize the baby as an anomaly and abandon it. Thus, this child is born into a world of suffering, not just for the herd that rejects it, but for the individual who is raised alone with no family, possibly by humans only. What will we do when the next one is born? Just put the two individuals in a space together and hope for the best? De-extincting such a creature carries additional costs we don't know how to quantify. Once that first, lonely, individual is sexually mature, will it even want to mate? Will it have the social skills to accept other future artificially-born mammoths as part of its herd? We have no way of "recreating" the social environment a mammoth would need to thrive in order to bring a self-sustaining herd of the species into balanced existence.
- oh_sigh 3y agoA wooly mammoth calf will look similar enough to an elephant calf that this would not be an issue. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/13/firm-bring-back-woolly-mammoth-from-extinction https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/13/firm-bring-b...
- nemo 3y agoThat's a claim they made without any evidence to support it, which is a troubling trend with this team. Personally I see them as engaging in unethical behavior by their misleading statements like that one where they genuinely can't know whether the hybrid would be rejected.
- oh_sigh 3y agoSure - I was just providing the link so one could see what a wooly mammoth calf might look like. Elephants are extremely bonded and very caring of their/their group's young, they take care of sick or injured elephants in their group - clearly there is no evidence for how an elephant would behave but I have my suspicion that a mammoth calf born would be readily accepted.
- schainks 3y agoIs an optimistic suspicion _enough_ to risk inflicting a lifetime of suffering if our suspicion was completely wrong on multiple levels? Even if the genes we splice work as expected, do we know they correctly produce an individual who can correctly socially mature? And of course, my next favorite argument from the anti-resurrection team was, "ok, we've produced a herd of socially functioning individuals who can reproduce and grow their own population. How long until we start using them for food again or straight up industrially farming them?"
- oh_sigh 3y agoWell, we could just euthanize the mammoth. These concerns didn't stop us from cloning dolly, or doing hundreds of other genetic experiments. Or millions of other instances of animal testing.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoOn the eve of being able to reverse extinction itself, the progressive/environmentalist/animal-rights-advocates crawled so far up their own asses that it became morally unacceptable to even try. You can't make this shit up, it's absolutely hilarious.
- mc32 3y agoThere are observed cases of mammals raising a different species of mammal, including wet-nursing them, so it does not seem to be the problem it's purported to be.
- zachruss92 3y agoStarting in Siberia, Pleistocene Park. Interesting question. I know the'll IVF an elephant (this is speculation) which I assume will raise it to an extent (though they could bottle feed I guess... thats a lot of milk). Mammoths are pack animals so I guess they'll need a bunch of them before they're released. https://colossal.com/pleistocene-park-return-of-the-mammoths-ecosystem/ https://colossal.com/pleistocene-park-return-of-the-mammoths...
- sn0wf1re 3y agoIf it is anything like an elephant, it would live in a herd. Just bringing a single one into this world seems somewhat cruel.